The Soul Weaver (17 page)

“Who is it? Another spying one? A servant of the sword-carrier?” A gravelly voice spoke in my ear.

Hands grabbed each of my arms. I twisted my arms to loosen their grip and drew up my knees to kick their feet out from under them. But I couldn't get loose, and my captors dragged me out of the bushes and slammed me onto my knees, pinning my arms behind me.

Night's mother! Standing right in front of me, as if he had just stepped out of my dream, was the one-eyed dwarf. On one side of me, holding my arm in a grip worthy of a Zhid wrestler, was the wide brown man, and on the other was the wiry black runner, every bit as strong as his leathery friend.

“Who are you?” I whispered, amazement taking all the fight out of me for the moment.

“It is he!” said the dwarfish man quietly, putting his finger to his lips and grinning through his beard. “Joyful! Oh, tell us that we have not damaged you, great Master!”

The two big ones didn't let go of me, but they eased up enough that I wasn't afraid they'd break my limbs any more.

“I'm all right. Where the devil have you come from? What do you want with me? The dreams . . .”

“It is not yet time for your questioning, great Master. You must come to the Bounded . . . if you are the one we seek. Best follow. And soon! We are here to help you find your way!” He bowed deeply, bursting into giddy laughter. The other two followed suit, the brown man laughing in dry, hacking bleats, and his tall companion in rolling rumbles as deep as the midnight of his coloring.

“Karon, no!” My mother called out from beyond the trees, distracting me from the mystery of the three. “Gerick, run!”

Satisfaction rippled through me at that moment. The Prince hadn't changed her mind; she still believed in me. I would not let her down.

I shook off the brown and black hands and jumped to my feet. The three of them were still chuckling merrily. I didn't believe they meant me any harm. “I need to get away from here,” I said. “Someone's trying to hurt me.”

“Away?” said the dwarf, scarcely able to swallow his laughter. “We could take you away. A short away. Not all the away. Our way is not your away. You must find your own. But come—”

He was interrupted by the snapping of branches behind me. “Who are you? What are you doing here? Sword of Annadis! Tell me this is a dream.” My mother.

The three burst out laughing again and crammed themselves behind a thick-boled oak tree, while I turned to tell her what I planned. She stood in the shadowed tangle of lilacs, hard to see. Moonlight glinted on the knife in her hand. Perhaps I had been mistaken about her, too.

Yet even as I hesitated, she threw down her weapon and extended her arms. “Gerick! Your father—Gerick, tell me who you are.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but things quickly became very confusing. I needed to get to her. The sounds coming from the shadows . . . I knew them well: the soft thud, the rip of muscle and crack of bone, the brief expulsion of air, followed by the quick intake as the pain shot upward. Such sounds always accompanied the hard curve and smooth feel of a knife hilt, and the satisfying release as rubbery flesh and tough cartilage yielded to the honed edge of the blade.

The tangled, twiggy shrubbery snagged my clothes as I fought to get to her.

“Mother? Are you all right?”

But she wasn't. Her garments were soaked with blood. Wide-eyed, she touched her breast where the knife hilt protruded, and her hand came away covered in blood. I caught her before she fell.

I had no healing skills, and only the small amount of power that lay unbidden in the hands of every Dar'Nethi. That would never be enough. Only one way to get her the help she needed. Mustering every dram of power and will I could scrape together, I held my back against the door in my mind and called out to the Prince with sorcery.
Father, come. Hurry . . .

Such anger . . . withering fury . . . cold death did I find when I touched his thoughts. Only in its absence did I even begin to realize the grace my true father had brought to my healing.

She's here in the alder grove beyond the ruined root cellar . . . wounded . . .
That was all I could get out before the storm of his wrath engulfed me. I broke off the contact, panting and sweating as if I'd run half a day in the desert. No use to tell him I hadn't done what he thought, or even that my mother would die unless he came instantly to care for her. He would come. And I had to be gone when he did so.

I peered through the thick limbs, strained my ears to hear a footstep . . . a cough . . . a breath . . . to tell me that the villain who'd done this was within reach of my justice. The three odd creatures from my dreams were still chuckling, hidden behind their oak tree. Several pairs of boots pounded the leafy ground, but the three men were running toward me, not away. Paulo. Radele. The Prince. Where had the assassin gone?

I laid my mother in the damp leaves beside the lilacs. She fought for breath, and her hands grew cold though I chafed them unceasingly. Her eyes clouded. What could I say to her? I needed her to know . . . “Hold on. Trust me.” I couldn't think of anything else. She wouldn't want to hear what I was going to do to the person who had hurt her.

And so I left her, trying to ignore the rumbling in my head that felt like an approaching earthquake, and I hurried to where the dwarf and his companions awaited me. “I must go away from here now.”

“To what awayness would you go, great Master?”

“Outside the walls of this parkland, to the outer gate. Can you show me the way out?”

“Nicely can we do that. But not more? Not into the treeland or the grassy abiding? Not to the place of many walls?”

I had no idea what they meant. “No. Just show me how to get over the walls and back to the main gate without being seen”—the shouts were getting very close—“and it has to be now.”

“Now!” said the dwarf.

“Now!” echoed the brown man and the runner. The two grabbed my arms again and gave a tug. As the thought occurred to me that they were not planning to lead me down any ordinary path, I fell off the edge of the world for the span of two breaths and stepped back onto it right next to the gates of Windham.

The only ill effect of the strange transport was a distinctly queasy feeling. My nausea wasn't helped in the least by the bloody knife in my hand. My mother's knife. Stupid to pull it out of her. I dropped it hastily. My hands were sticky, and I stank of blood. Thank all gods that my father was a Healer.

“Unsettles the belly,” said the dwarf, grinning. He patted his own substantial paunch and then did the same to mine.

“That's a truth,” I said, “but I've no sword sticking through my gut, either, and that would be more unsettling yet.” I gave the three a proper bow, and thought that perhaps when I had finished the next step of my escape plan, we might try their magic again. “I thank you, Sir—?”

“Vroon?” said the dwarf, hesitantly.

“I thank you, Sir Vroon. Well done.”

The dwarf puffed out his chest and grinned hugely. “A name! Do you hear it? The great Master has given me a name! My debt is unstoppable, sir. My honor is to serve you always until the Unbounded is no more, and the Bounded has grown ancient in its days.”

There simply wasn't time to decipher his odd speech. My father's rage rent the night. If I just had enough power left to do what I needed. A simple thing . . .

I did. After a long few moments, Jasyr raced through the gates and stopped right in front of me, quivering and tossing his head, just as he did when I galloped away from my dreams. The only problem was that another horse followed right on his tail. And that horse had a rider.

“I knew it, you bloody bastard. I'll kill you for this. How could you do it?”

He was off Molly and on top of me before I could blink, and I was afraid I might have to break both his arms to keep him from doing what he said. His eyes were blazing, and he obviously didn't care in the least what I did to him, unless it was kill him before he'd done the same to me.

“I didn't do it,” I gasped, getting him pinned and making sure I didn't leave him a finger's leeway before I'd convinced him. “Any of it. I swear.”

“She's dead. You killed her, you black-hearted devil.”

“She won't die. He'll save her. If it's possible, he'll do it. I don't have the skill for healing, so I called him to come. Would I have called him if I wanted her to die? I don't. Of course, I don't.”

“I don't believe you. Her blood is all over you.”

Vroon and his friends grabbed Paulo and yanked him out from under me, and he didn't even notice, any more than he noticed the blood dripping from his nose into the dirt or the fact that his shirt was half torn off him. He never took his eyes from my face.

“Why should you believe me?” I said. “I wouldn't either, if I were you. So believe what you want; it doesn't change the truth.”

“I don't want to believe it. I thought I knew you.”

“Then listen to what I say. I'll swear on anything you want that I didn't hurt my mother. I could never do that.”

“You'll swear, but it don't mean dung on my boots when you don't have a lick of truth in you.” He kicked the bloody knife toward me. “Pick it up and kill me, too. It's the only way you'll get away with it.”

“Go back and help them. Tell my mother what I've said. I've got to get away or I'll be dead, too. Then we'll never know who really did it, or what's the truth of any of this business. Look who's holding you. They showed up tonight and helped me get away. Do you remember what I told you about my dreams?”

He had finally settled down enough to take notice of the three odd-looking fellows who had his arms pinned behind him and were folding his legs underneath him so he couldn't get off his knees. The sight of the thin black arms, the thick brown ones, and the one-eyed face scowling straight at him, no taller than his own face, surprised him just enough to make him listen. “Bloody Jerrat!”

“I've got to go find out what's going on, Paulo. It's all connected: the dreams, these disappearances in Leire, the shepherd's story about his son disappearing . . . I'll wager these very same events the Prince is set to kill me for are part of it, too. I didn't do those things he says, and I didn't hurt my mother. If you end up believing I did any of it, you can break my neck at your pleasure. Now, go away.”

“I won't.”

“Suit yourself, then. Stay here and rot.” I mounted Jasyr and motioned to the three to let him go.

He strode across the trampled grass to where his Molly waited for him. I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to erase the image of a skinny, freckled boy who twisted painfully with every step. Another vision. A flush of shame heated my skin as jeers of “donkey,” “thief's brat,” and “cripple” echoed through a dusty street I had never walked. With every mental discipline I knew, I willed the vision away. I had no time for madness.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw Paulo only as he was that night: tall, wiry, surprisingly strong, thrusting himself into the saddle with the two good legs that the Prince—no, that my father, Karon—had given him. He ripped the tail off his shirt, wiped the blood from his face and threw the rag on the ground. “I'm going with you.”

“With a murderer? A traitor? Would you ride with a Lord of Zhev'Na?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. You've got some convincing to do.” He didn't say which way I'd have to convince him.

Sometime after freeing Paulo and before the two of us rode off together, Vroon and his friends had vanished. Perhaps I hadn't thanked them properly for saving my life twice in one night. I dared not wait around for them, so, as the moon rose, I set a brisk pace through the winding lanes to the highroad, and then headed northward at a canter. We didn't stop until dawn.

As the light crept over the countryside, we searched for a place to rest and water the horses. I picked a spot where the road crossed a wide, sluggish stream, riding a few hundred paces upstream along the marshy bank in hopes of finding cleaner water to fill our empty waterskins. As soon as we dismounted, Paulo settled himself on a hummock of grayish grass that seemed to be the only dry spot within half a league of the stream. From the scowl he had worn since we had left Windham, I saw that asking to share the seat would be of no use.

So once I had filled the waterskins, I stood stupidly in the mud, stroking Jasyr's neck and rummaging in my saddle pack, hoping to find my cloak and something to eat. The morning felt chilly, as my shirt was soaked and muddy from my adventures in the damp Windham gardens. All I found in the pack was one spare shirt—an ugly, useless green silk thing my mother had dug out of Tennice's attic—a change of undergarments and leggings, the silly-looking hat I'd worn as part of my “disguise,” a blanket, two cups, one spoon, a small pot, and my flint and steel. No cloak and not so much as a dry biscuit to eat. Then I remembered I'd left the cloak in the gatehouse at Windham wrapped around a pile of leaves. And as for the food—

“You won't find nothing in my kit, neither,” said Paulo, as if he had read my mind or heard my stomach rumbling. “All in the gray saddle pack. You threw it into the corner of the gatehouse. Remember?” He wasn't finished being angry with me yet.

“We'll just have to figure out something. Stop in a village and buy what we need, I suppose.” I turned out my pockets and found exactly twelve coppers. About enough for half a dozen mugs of ale or three loaves of stale bread. I glanced at Paulo.

“At least you didn't
steal
from the Lady before you stabbed her,” he said. “I gave her the silver from selling the horses and the pony trap.”